Providing an end-to-end Apprentice Journey from Enrollment to Certification
The Challenge
The Federation of Industry Sector Skills and Standards (FISSS) has been delivering apprenticeship framework certification to England, Wales and Scotland for nearly 10 years.
Certifying up to 300,000 apprentices a year, and due to a regulatory government change FISSS needed a way to manage the journey of every one of its apprentices from enrollment to graduation and have access to a comprehensive, single source of truth about the apprenticeship journey and results.
The Federation came to us knowing that it needed to undergo a drastic digital transformation and move away from its existing operation to a new centralised management system, but it didn’t know how to get where it needed to be.
The Solution
ACE360 has been built from the ground up to meet the needs of organisations delivering the new style Apprenticeship Standards programmes. We worked in partnership with FISSS over a three year period to conceptualise, strategise, design, develop, build and iterate on an idea that became a revolutionary industry-wide journey management system.
To build ACE360 we integrated ourselves into the business to deeply understand the business objectives and the customers needs through end user workshops, the discovery process and having the flexibility to continuously develop a live system, through iterative and carefully planned updates designed to improve the customer experience and increase the feature set.
The power of ACE360 is in its drastic simplification of the End Point Assessment process. It’s fully integrated with industry wide training and allows seamless transition from gateway readiness all the way to scheduling and sitting the End Point Assessment (including re-sits and appeals) and automatically requesting certification through an integration with the ESFA portal.
For assessors, this means accessing an off the shelf solution that comes with a built in knowledge library of mission critical documentation that acts as a single source of truth for all 300,000 apprentices every year and completely removes the need for a physical paper trail or digging through inboxes for documentation.
Terabytes of data are processed using ACE360 and with hundreds of incredibly detailed standards to maintain (and hundreds more in development), we built the system with the capability to scale over time and be easily maintainable, updatable and configurable by FISSS’ in-house, non-technical team.
Going Above and Beyond
We know that large amounts of data can be challenging to handle and we wanted ACE360 to be as intuitive and simple to use as possible. So we built in customisable workflow management to help keep every ACE360 user on a single direction track and combined that with cloud hosting so it works smoothly across a range of browsers and screen sizes and empowers users to work in on any device, in any location.
It is also built with GDPR in mind and allows system administrators the ability to assign records to specific staff members, this ensures that staff only see records that are relevant to their caseload. Users only see records and actions such as resits and appeals that are relevant to them.
The Results
ACE 360 gave users unprecedented access and monitoring to the apprentice journey for more than 300,000 individuals and continues to help the FISSS and its certifiers manage the apprentice journey from enrollment to graduation.
The workflow management system now integrates with Learning Management Systems to provide a more comprehensive solution and undisputed single source of truth for all information regarding the programmes apprentices from start to finish.
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